Fight Club in Real Life

My all time favorite movie is Fight Club, so I was fairly interested when I saw an article on USA today about real life fight clubs that have been springing up. How anyone who has seen the disturbing gore of that movie could actually want to try it out for real is beyond me, but apparently it's a spreading problem. Here's the link for the full article, and I've included some of the more interesting parts below. (All of the following paragraphs are the copyright of USA Today).

"The video shows two bare-knuckle brawlers brutally punching each other until one slumps, beaten, to the ground. The fight doesn't end there: The victor straddles the chest of his fallen opponent, firing rights and lefts into his face.

This is not a scene from the Brad Pitt movie Fight Club. Instead, it involves real teenagers in an underground video called Agg Townz Fights 2. Their ring: the grassy schoolyard of Seguin High School here. They're engaged in a disturbing extreme sport that has popped up across the nation: teen fight clubs."

"When the protagonist of author Chuck Palahniuk's cult 1996 novel Fight Club is asked by a client at a business meeting how he ended up with a black eye and a cheek swollen with stitches, he gives the all-purpose answer of kids everywhere: "I fell." [Note: This is incorrect, he actually tells a nurse in the hospital he fell."]

That fictional scene explains how many teens involved in real-life fight clubs are able to keep them under the radar — even when they come home from school or show up in class with cuts, bruises and swollen knuckles."

Fight clubs tap into a dark, nihilistic "part of the American psyche fascinated by the spectacle of blood and violence," says Orin Starn, cultural anthropology professor at Duke University who teaches about sports in American society. "This does seem a phenomenon of the Mortal Kombat, violent video game generation. The fight club offers the chance to bring those fantasies of violence and danger to life — and maybe have your 15 minutes of fame in an underground video."

Chuck Palahniuk, author of the cult 1996 novel Fight Club that was the basis for the 1999 movie, declined an interview request but said, "God bless these kids. I hope they're having a great time. I don't think they'd be doing it if they weren't having a great time."

The fictional fight club led by Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, in the 1999 movie was made up mostly of men in their twenties who made a sadistic and masochistic sport out of fighting one another.

Durden's main rule for his club became the movie's signature line and a slogan in popular culture: You do not talk about Fight Club.

Teen fight clubs in Arlington often and elsewhere follow that advice, and police and school authorities have been frustrated by the wall of silence that has surrounded the clubs. Not one of the hundreds of parents who viewed clips from Agg Townz 2 at several community and church meetings seemed to have a clue that fight clubs existed — or that their kids were involved, Hawthorne says. Among local teens, he says, the clubs have been common knowledge.

For those who are stupid enough to be considering joining one of these fight clubs, check out this video of what happens to our good friend angelface during his fight with the narrator:

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